Responsibility and Authority

I've been re-reading Martha Stout's book, "The Sociopath Next Door", and thinking about sociopathy in the context of abuse [of course].

Towards the very end of her book, Dr. Stout observes two mortal errors that can be made in human moral interaction:

the first is an overweening desire to dominate others;

the second is an equally overweening willingness to relegate all other human beings to the status of objects [I-It relating].

As I was thinking about her words, it occurred to me that the pathological desire to dominate others also has two parts.

First, there is the desire to have absolute authority;

but second, equally to the desire for absolute authority, there is the desire for total evasion of responsibility.

As I continue to think about this, it seems to me that pathological domination, in this sense, is the essential dynamic of any abusive organization [church, work, club, family].

Wherever X demands all of the authority and accepts zero responsibility, while Y is scapegoated with all of the responsibility [and given no authority with which to address that responsibility], you are seeing the core dynamic of abuse. No such system can ever be anything but abusive.

[And this, I think, solves a major puzzle for those of us who wonder why so many workplaces, in particular, do not work.]